The power truly is with the people according to Tom Davies
It’s a new season, hopes spring eternal (for a while anyway) and it’s time to dwell on some positive developments at embattled clubs. The fan takeovers at Stockport and Rushden over the summer bring the number of British clubs now owned and operated by supporters’ trusts to 12, with another, Brentford, run if not yet owned by fans.
Friday 1 Sir Bobby’s interpretation of the Glazers’ outlook is rejected by Mark Longden of Man Utd fans group IMUSA: “I would like them to explain how they intend to pay off £500 million-worth of debt on profits of £19m. You do not need to be a financial expert to realise something big has to happen.” Middlesbrough’s new signing, Austrian defender Emanuel Pogatetz, may receive a six-month ban for an exceptionally violent tackle while on loan with Spartak Moscow; Boro reject Spurs’ £6m offer for Stewart Downing. George Burley is the new manager of Hearts. Good news for Wayne Rooney and Dennis Wise among others as FIFA scrap the ten-yards dissent rule. Greater Manchester Police reignite their old row with Wigan over an unpaid policing bill of £273,000, threatening to withdraw the JJB Stadium safety certificate unless it is paid by August.
The comprehensive corporate makeover of Austria Salzburg has brought in big money and big promises but has alienated supporters, as Paul Joyce reports
The Austrian Bundesliga has always been highly commercialised. Club names can be altered at the behest of new investors – hence FC Superfund in Pasching, or SCU Seidl Software of Untersiebenbrunn. With players plastered from head to arse in sponsors’ logos like motor-racing drivers, it’s fitting that Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz followed his acquisition of a Formula 1 team with that of SV Austria Salzburg in April.
David Stubbs on how the AFC Wimbledon story has been brought to the stage
Written by Matthew Couper, a local government arts officer and sometime stand-up comedian, A Fans’ Club is a modest theatrical undertaking but a worthy addition to that invidious yet strangely resilient genre – the football musical. It tells the story of a group of four Wimbledon fans who look on in passive astonishment as their beloved club is snatched from them by the seemingly larger, inevitable powers of commercial interest and dumped in Milton Keynes, their wishes ignored “like a tramp’s coat”. In the second act, however, moved by the spirit of the club that still lingers and pull together to form AFC Wimbledon. Commentating on this heroic turnaround are two “footballing Gods”, Hun-Batz and Hun-Choen, one of the play’s better devices, the “monkey twins” taken from Mayan mythology, who add both levity and a sense of the wider world of events.
New film Green Street is the latest to attempt to tap into the apparently growing US market for English hooligan-chic. Barney Ronay emerges battered and baffled
West Ham United aren’t particularly happy about Lexi Alexander’s new film about English football hooligans, part of which was shot in and around the Boleyn Ground. They’re not the only ones. Having sat through the entire two hours, I’m not very happy about it either. Also distressed, presumably, will be a trailer full of casting agents, stylists, location managers and accent coaches, who between them have managed to recruit and train a platoon of football faces that veers from the Irish-Cockney-Dick-Van-Dyke turn of Pete, head of the GSE West Ham crew, and star name Elijah Wood’s pale and frankly laughable imitation of a hardened street-fighter. “It just doesn’t make any sense. What are you even doing here?” Wood’s character is asked by his sister Shannon half an hour into the film. Wood has just turned up on her doorstep in South Kensington. Moments earlier he was being expelled from Yale over some vague business to do with his preppy room-mate selling drugs. Shannon, you feel, might have a point.